" The curse of being born a girl " Today , one hundred million women fail in Asia.

It should have been a scene of jubilation, a moment of happiness, giving birth to a child in a clinic on the outskirt of Delhi in India. But for the mother, it's consternation: the baby is a girl. The face of the young mother's closes up. "It's human nature to prefer boys said the midwife . Isn't it like that in your country? "

In "The Curse of being born a girl", a documentary awarded in 2006 by the Prize Albert-Londres, Manon Loizeau and Alexis Marant investigated the bleeding of a new kind, a violent discrimination that leads to unnatural selection, and worse to murder. Today, one hundred million women fail in Asia, either because they are not born or they have been killed at birth. Infanticide occurs in the privacy of homes, driven by poverty, religious beliefs and misogyny. In southern India, a woman who does not condemn her daughter to die is banished from the village community. It is this drama described by the film about the "missings", which may be two hundred million in twenty -five years, according to alarming projections of the UN and UNICEF.

BURIED PAIN

The authors have achieved the feat of shooting in five weeks - three in India, one in Pakistan and one in China - what they called "Filming the invisible". To make palpable this mass phenomenon of "missing women", the two journalists went in dozens of villages populated mostly of boys and men, as if in the family photo, the girls had been excluded. It took a long tedious work of approach with the help of interpreters and specialized NGOs to get women willing to confide. The challenge was to bring forth the buried pain. Such as the mother of two girls who tells how she poisoned with tobacco juice, her third daughter born ten years ago. The astrologer of the village had told her that her husband would die if the baby was kept alive.

In India, this practice banned since 1960 continues to thrive in the fertile soil of superstitions and Hindu traditions. This negative attitude is compounded by the persistence of dowry system, while in China, a country proning only one child, the boy is the sole heir of property. Otherwise, the property will be passed onto a cousin.

Although condemned by Islam, the practice of removing girls has increased in Pakistan with impoverishment. In twenty years, the Edhi Foundation found in ditches and cities' garbage dumps, an horrendous amount of dead infants and collected 30,000 abandoned girls. Like this little girl found one evening starving in the bush of a park; one of the most dramatic scenes of this documentary, which delivers overwhelming numbers, because the selection is increased by the widespread access to ultrasound. 80% of the six million abortions performed each year in India would be driven by the pregnancies of girls, a very lucrative market for physicians.

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Manon Loizeau and Alexis Marant -